Saturn

Adaptation

Adapting the world to our needs. The possibility of adapting ourselves to a world. Inhospitality. Ethiopian, Tibetan, and Andean elevation adaptation. Andean vampires?

Titan Habitability

Atmosphere. Temperature. Breathability. Tidal locking and avoiding tidal locking with Jupiter. Frozen and liquid water! Methane oceans. No shortage of atmospheres in our solar system, but we’re short on good ones.

Comparative eyeball studies

Human eyes are pretty sweet! But there other ones that do other things (at their own local summits on Mount Improbable) and are also really good at stuff! Goats, sharks, snakes (sorta), bees. Removing your lenses for fun and profit. Monet’s lens removal and ultraviolet perception.

Eyeball shortcomings

Common “colorblindness” is a misnomer, but “color discernment syndrome” doesn’t flow as well. Retinal wiring and the “blind spot.” Saccades. “Chronostasis” or “the stopped clock illusion” and the tight coupling of our eyes and our brains.

The Megalodon

Irl best estimates of megalodon size vs the creatures of the film. Limited fossil data and cartilaginous skeletons. Learning from paleoarchaeological study of ancient shark relatives with more calcified skeletal material. Working backward from the modern shark bodyform. Ancient buzzsaw-mouthed monsters. The importance of teeth.

If you are supporting Decipher SciFi on our Patreonby Fri, December 21 2018 will get to see your name for a character in our new show! It’s Decipher RPG, a video show and podcast where we’ll get up to some scifi hijinks. And the world will need characters. And the characters will need spacesuits or something. But also they’ll need names. And it could be yours!

Burt the Masticating robot? Josh the Weenus Collector? [Your Name] the human of precisely average strength? You get the idea.

This movie

It gets a bit weird! And we have a bit of a time summarizing it.

Storytelling

Adventure stories. Social allegory. The power of science fiction in particular to force you to reframe your perception by believably breaking your assumptions. HG Wells and Moreau. Science fiction tropes and the subversion thereof. Christopher is bad at human things.

Code Switching

Languages, dialect, and speaking to your audience. “Not having to think about it.”

Cronenberg

Creepy body horror. Fingers in holes. This is kinda hot.

The video game industry

Gaming in film. Brainscan. The video game bubble. E.T. The Video Game landfill debacle. AAA Game budgets before people took the industry seriously. AAA Auteur creators of the past. Auteur creators in indie games now.

Brain in a jar

Rare earth elements

Actually: not so rare! But a pain in the ass to extract. The Japanese rare earth ocean-bottom treasure trove and how it will be difficult to access. Mining rare earth elements from spaaaaaaaace and how we probably need a new colloquial name for these materials. Underwater volcanoes.

Orbital impacts

Glowing blood and possible alien infections. Human sensitivity to positive and negative g-forces. Trying to push more blood to your head for mental superpowers.

Orbital transfer

And impromptu deorbiting. How to crash a probe into mars (by accident).

Pressurization

Chinese space stations, then and now. Station entrance and exit procedures. Finally the Star Trek balloon analogy comes in handy! Decompression sickness/the bends during EVA. Portable life support systems. Sokol and ACES, and their insufficiency for extra-vehicular activities.

EVA Suits

Past designs and modern designs. Future EVA suit developments. Constrictive suits directly against the skin rather than creating an atmosphere around the body: the biosuit. The NASA Z Suit that looks like Buzz Lightyear, and operating EVA suits at the same pressure as your space station.

Reentry

Soyuz reentry angles. Heat shielding. Trying to point in a particular direction.

Lifting

The complete obviousness that heavy compound weight lifting is the major solution to muscle and bone loss in space. Bro do you even lift? Vacuum-based space squat rack.